The Summers Of The Feminists' Discontent
Everybody wants to pooh-pooh the biological differences between men and women. It seems so much nicer to say men and women are not only equal, but the same. Well, biology says that's simply not true.

Unfortunately, it seems a very career-risking idea to even suggest studying such a thing if women are within earshot. For example, here are excerpts from a few of my columns that have enraged female readers into trying to get me fired -- not because I didn't prove my points, but because they weren't very nice, and because the world "should" be different:

Swelling Herself Short"Male sexuality is all about the visuals. That's why men's magazines are filled with pictures of naked women with freakishly large breasts while women's magazines are filled with pictures of lip gloss."

The Taming Of The Spew"Expecting the average man to be as emotionally articulate as a woman makes about as much sense as expecting your 4-year-old to get work as a tax accountant, or your goldfish to play fetch."

Getting back to Summers...I'd forgotten about the study I'd read for the "Swelling" column about how girls born with bodies that produce too much androgen behave more like boys. This Helena Cronin piece reminded me of that and other reasons why Harvard's Summers was right in wondering whether there might be innate differences that keep women out of the sciences...despite all the lady scientist hysterics meant to cover up the possibility (including, most ironically, warnings of impending attacks of the vapors from merely hearing his words). Cronin writes in the Guardian:

...As evolutionary science shows, Summers was right - for three reasons.

First, men, on average, have an advantage in certain quantitative and spatial abilities - particularly intuitive mechanics and "3-D thinking" (mental rotation of three-dimensional objects) - that are key for engineering and maths.

Second, there are, on average, sex differences in dispositions, interests, values. Men are far more competitive, ambitious, status-conscious and single-minded; and they'd rather work with abstract ideas or objects than with humans. Women are more focused on family and other relationships; they have wider interests and prefer not to work in people-free zones. When women leave high-powered jobs to "spend more time with the family", it's truth, not euphemism. In the US, even in the top 1% of mathematical ability, only one woman to eight men makes a career in maths, engineering or science; the other seven choose medicine, biology, law or even the humanities - typically, to work with, and help, people.

Third, sex differences exhibit greater male than female variance. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round the mean. But among males, the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst, can be vast. So, when it comes to science, more men than women will be dunces but more will be geniuses - although the means are close. The maths averages of American teenage boys and girls are not dramatically different; but among the most mathematically gifted there are 13 boys for every girl. Sex differences are crucially about variance as well as means.

Now combine these three factors. Isn't it unlikely that the distribution of men and women working in science will be identical? And the higher the echelon, the greater will be the preponderance of men - with obvious outcomes for elite institutions such as Harvard.

These differences are not recent or artificial or arbitrary. They have deep evolutionary reasons, which are well understood. Sexual reproduction as we know it began with one sex specialising slightly more in competing for mates and the other slightly more in caring for offspring. This divergence became self-reinforcing, widening over evolutionary time, with natural selection proliferating and amplifying variations on the differences, down the generations, in every sexually reproducing species that has ever existed. Thus, from this slight but fundamental initial asymmetry, flow all the characteristic differences between males and females throughout the living world. Now, 800 million years later, in our species as in all others, these differences pervade what constitutes being male or female, from brains to bodies to behaviour.

A wealth of evidence backs up this view of our evolutionary endowment, ranging from newborns (even at one day old, girls prefer a human face, boys a mechanical mobile) to pathology (females exposed to "male" hormones in the womb are typically "tomboyish" and surpass the female average in spatial skills - and vice versa for males) and children's play (boys' games are competitive, big on rules and establishing a winner, girls' are more cooperative and end in consensus). These and other predictable sex differences are robust across cultures, and throughout history.

...Or consider the cognitive differences that disadvantage girls in maths. Shouldn't we be drawing more - not less - attention to them? How else will interventions be devised that don't treat girls as default males? Bear in mind that mathematical ability itself is not an evolved ability; maths is far too recent for that. Rather, mathematical talent borrows eclectically from abilities evolved for other purposes. Much of the mathematical advantage of boys lies in spatial abilities for navigation - an area in which females are notoriously weaker; in particular, boys are better than girls at using these innate capacities to turn quantitative relations into diagrams. So why not help girls improve their skills? When males and females (both adults and children) are helped with translating word problems into diagrams, the performance of females improves more than that of males - thus closing some of the gap between the sexes. By contrast, self-confidence in maths, which also favours boys, makes some impact; but it is relatively small. So forget classes in "self-esteem" or "empowerment". Go for evolutionarily informed teaching in maths classes. Admittedly, more female-friendly maths won't guarantee more female Nobel prize-winners. But it should enable more girls to realise their potential. And isn't that what fairness is about?

Because women are not necessarily biologically favored to be scientists does not mean they cannot be scientists. It does, however, explain why there might not be so many lady scientists. Too many women are on the thought police force. As a woman, I find it insulting that they are so threatened, on all our behalf, by the mere expression of ideas -- in this case, by the expression of a very good idea ("let's study the possibility of innate differences and see if we might make up for some of them!") which was lost in the embarrassing vagina monologue that followed.

Comments

The subject of women in the sciences is fascinating to me. I am a social worker and writer -- both of which are fields with large numbers of women -- and most of my closest women friends do not work in the sciences. However, one of my female childhood friends is an epidemiologist, and on my street, quite literally ALL of my female neighbors are scientists of one sort or another. Some are doctors, others are computer engineers, and still others are researchers in the biotech industry.

I have no doubt that there are innate differences between how men and women think, and I would be like to see a study on it. I can understand, however, why people might fear seeing the results of the study. Already there is social pressure working against women in math and science, and in my mind this plays a bigger role than any biological differences. (I am in a physics Ph.D. program, and too many of the women in our program were actively discouraged from pursuing physics at some point because they were female-and these are the ones who made it). If a study shows apparent disadvantages for women in science, it will likely have more impact in the tacit social pressure against women in math and science, than in addressing ways to overcome those differences. Already people draw faulty conclusions from current data: men have more gray matter, which is important for calculations, men are better at math and physics, but that same study shows that women may be better at logic, which I believe to be a far more important skill for math and science. Or what about the fact that men that have ring and index fingers close to the same length (a feminine characteristic) are better at science research? People are too ready to draw conclusions that women are disadvantaged.

That said, the value of the study would not be in discovering disadvantages (I’m sure there are some), but strengths that women have, and how to help women learn math and science in an advantageous way. Men and women think differently, it can only help science when there are more people thinking about a problem in more ways.

Maria
at March 14, 2005 7:47 AM

I think a mass movement to treat people like the individuals they are would do a world of good.

Todd Fletcher
at March 14, 2005 8:12 AM

Amy, that last passage is money in the bank. Green, leafy money.

Cridland
at March 14, 2005 9:09 AM

"men are better at math and physics, but that same study shows that women may be better at logic, which I believe to be a far more important skill for math and science."

I'm assuming you mean "informal logic" -- the discipline concerned with the internal consistency of verbal statements -- rather than formal logic, which really looks a whole lot like math (ugly, ugly stuff). Personally, I think that BOTH of these broad skill sets (numbers/words) are critical for good scientific work. So much of scientific method is essentially cookbook -- you've got to follow the rules of study design, data collection, statistical analysis, etc. The more creative side -- hypothesis generation, spinning out the results into discussions, implications, conclusions, is a lot more of a verbal thing. It's never either/or with good science: you need the quantitative rigor and the more intuitive, "big picture" perspective. Perhaps this is why so many scientific publications have so many authors -- it's so hard to find one person -- man or woman -- who can straddle both skill sets. And that is why I, Lena Cuisina, am the answer to this whole conflict. I can and DO straddle ANYTHING! It's Monday morning, and I can barely walk!

Lena Cuisina, Lover of Questions
at March 14, 2005 10:16 AM

Hi Lena –

>>I'm assuming you mean "informal logic"

>>-- the discipline concerned with the internal

>>consistency of verbal statements -- rather than

>>formal logic, which really looks a whole

>>lot like math (ugly, ugly stuff).

Now, now, let's not forget Tractatus ! (smile)

"For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.

The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered."

It's only Monday morning for you. Over here we've had a whole day long of it.

L'Amerloque

L'Amerloque
at March 14, 2005 10:50 AM

Oh, L'Amerloque, if only I were as well read as you! The closet I've ever come to reading Wittgenstein is an incredible novel by David Markson called "Wittgenstein's Mistress."

I couldn't do it justice in a brief description -- besides, I read it almost 20 years ago.

Lena
at March 14, 2005 12:11 PM

Hi Lena –

I haven't read any Markson whatsoever, so I'm not as well read as, er, you would have me believe. Thanks for the compliment, though, if compliment indeed it was. (smile)

I've now read the blurb on Amazon and, on your recommendation, I shall put this book on my "to be read" list. That's the very best I can do re Markson, since, as Wittgenstein put it:

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

L'Amerloque

L'Amerloque
at March 14, 2005 12:28 PM

Not to make light of women and tech/science, but how are we going to teach men how to navigate relationships and to have better emotional intelligence? I'm a programmer, and pretty nerdy for the most part, maybe if there had been some sort of federal grant for teaching how to be a smooth operator, I could get a little further up teh corporate ladder.

Haha! Just kidding, I totally love my nerdiness.

Charlie
at March 14, 2005 3:53 PM

There's no such thing as "emotional intelligence." It's an imaginary skill for people whose real skills are not valued by the marketplace. It's something for them to talk about as they commiserate.

Cridland
at March 14, 2005 5:50 PM

What about "spatial intellegence," Crid? I think it really helped me on the analytical section of the GRE (but has done shit for me in real life, of course).

Ditto. (Except for that one scuba dive off Santa Rosa in 1996.) That's the thing, all these very nuanced tendencies and trends and predispositions that are claimed as the source of poor gender valuations never actually seem to mean anything to anybody. Michael Jordan has a better understanding of his motion through space than 99.9 of humanity, but Serena Williams does no less well. Neither of them credit their success to "emotional intelligence." I don't know of *any* great success in human history (in warfare, finance, music, anything) who's credited their achievement to emotional intelligence.

Cridland
at March 15, 2005 11:48 AM

I can't believe a WOMAN is saying all this! Finally, someone who has the guts to accept reality. Men are better at math. It's evolutionary, men had to build weapons in the stone age, which involves mathematical thinking.

I study ev psych -- just got back from the Human Behavior & Evolution conference in Austin. I'm pro-data and anti-whining. And I'm barely well enough versed in math to work a calculator. Some idiot wrote a dumbass story, front page of LATimes today, concluding, albeit somewhat jokingly, that existence of class of six female chem engineers disproves Summers' contentions. MORE-ON!

Why don't more women become mathematicians? Because we suck at math! It's hard enough being a writer, which is an area I tend to show some skill in at times.